


Leap

by neuroglam



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, depressed victor, kittens and nailpolish, time-travel and other time-fuckery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-01-06 23:04:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12220785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuroglam/pseuds/neuroglam
Summary: One night, sixteen-year-old Victor shows up in Victor's bed and gets him thinking.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tags will grow as work progresses.

Victor opens his eyes blearily. Nothing unusual—he’s nearing forty, he’s started to sleep less, wake up in the middle of the night. Usually, he’d reach for the glass of water on his night stand. Go piss. Try to fall back asleep.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, there’s a weight on his chest: skinny arms curled around him, long pale hair spilling messily all over his duvet. Chipped black nail-polish, faintly visible in the light from outside.

He knows who this is—there’s no one else it could be—but he doesn’t know _how._ Victor went to bed alone last night—locked the door, brushed his teeth. Spent way too long on his tablet before falling asleep. So how does his younger self show up in his bed?

It doesn’t feel like he’s asleep, but he’s got to be. Either that or time-travel, and he doesn’t remember meeting his older self when he was young. He pinches himself: that’s what people in the movies do.

It doesn’t change a thing.

Then his bladder chimes in, and Victor sighs.

“Vitya,” he whispers gently and nudges his sleeping self. “Vitya. Move a little, I need to pee.”

“Huh… what?” Young Victor mumbles sleepily—and then he blinks and jerks up, wide-eyed and breathing quickly.

Victor supposes it makes sense. If he’d randomly woken up at a strange place in some old weirdo’s bed, he’d be scared, too. He raises his hands and gives young Victor time. “You’re dreaming,” he tells his younger self. “One of these lucid dreams.”

In the dark, Young Victor peers at him suspiciously.

“And I’m old you,” Victor continues. “I’m not going to hurt you. I assume that when you wake up, you’ll be back in your bed at Yakov and Lilia’s and you won’t remember a thing.”

Young Victor blinks.

“Look, ask me something only I will know,” Victor tries.

Young Victor looks around. “Where’s Makkachin?”

Wow—did Victor ever speak this soft and girly? “He led a long life, and died happy and well-cared for. You were with him,” he reassures.

Young Victor sighs sadly and looks down at the bedsheets. At least he’s not jumping around screaming, Victor thinks. That’s good.

“Turn on the light,” young Victor says.

Victor clicks on his small reading lamp. He gets it; he’d be tempted to survey the damage, too. “Look.” He shows young Victor the side of his right arm, where there’s three moles right next to each other and a faint scar from where a glass cut him when he fell off his bike at six. “See?”

Young Victor studies his arm, then looks up.

“Ask me something else,” Victor says.

Young Victor narrows his eyes. “What’s gonna be on Marishkina’s term test?”

Marishkina was his evil, evil history teacher and asked them to memorize a whole slew of names and dates from the Middle Ages. So this is eighth grade. “Not telling you,” he says light-heartedly. “No spoilers of the future.”

“Fuck.”

“Let me go pee, now.” Victor moves to get out of bed and puts his slippers on, slightly woozy. It _is_ the middle of the fucking night. “You can think of questions for when I came back.”

He shuffles down the hall and into the bathroom. The stream of piss hits the water in the toilet, audibly. Victor grunts and realizes—he hasn’t closed the door. He’d gotten out of the habit, what with how much pleasure Yuri takes in telling him he’s gross.

“You’re bald,” his younger self says accusingly when Victor comes back to the bedroom.

“Aa. And I have wrinkles, and I got fat, too.” He prods at his belly pouch. “But it turned out OK,” he says softly as he sits back on the bed. “It all turned out OK. There were times that sucked and times when I was unsure—when _you’ll_ be unsure—but you always got through it in the end.” He remembers eight grade and how much he’d needed that reassurance.

Young Victor looks at him almost accusingly—and Victor remembers. If someone had gone up to eight-grade him and tried to tell him not to worry ‘cause it’ll all work out fine,’ he wouldn’t have trusted them either. “I’m not going to tell you there won’t be hard times. Or that it’s not hard now. But I lived through it.” He tries his best to reassure. 

“Who was your first crush?” Young Victor challenges.

“Misha Medvedev in third grade,” Victor says softly and meets his young self’s stare. He knows for sure that no other living soul knows of this—or of the liking boys thing in general. When he was young, it’d felt like it was the worst thing and no one should ever find out.

Young Victor nods, satisfied with the knowledge. He can’t imagine, not yet, that there would be a time in his life when his crush on Misha Medvedev would be the kind of thing he’d have no problem telling his lover over breakfast.

“Come here,” Victor says and spreads his arms. He feels a little sad. It’s coming back, what it felt like to have that secret inside you. To be afraid of what would happen if someone ever found out. He needs a hug. Needs to give himself a hug. “You were all curled up around me when you were asleep anyway,” he tells Young Victor. “It’s okay.”

Between the moles, the scar, and Misha Medvedev, Young Victor seems to feel safe enough to scoot back to Victor. He’s a little awkward as he stretches out and cuddles up to him. It’s been a while, for his young self, since he’d last had someone to touch and hold him. Lilia and Yakov don’t, and there’s no boyfriend—this Victor doesn’t care about girls and is certain that he can’t let anyone know about the boy thing, either.

There was only Makkachin.

“How’s Makka?” Victor says lightly as he pets his young self’s hair. “Will you tell me about him?”

Young Victor tenses up a little—Victor probably shouldn’t have pushed with the hair—and makes an escape, casually pulling back and looking up at Victor like he’s weird.

“Didn’t you say you were there?” young Victor says.

“I was.” He pulls his hands away to let young Victor know that it’s safe. “But it was a long time ago. I miss Makka.” He reaches over to turn off the reading lamp. It’s not too dark anyway, with the light coming from the window. “Come back down,” he says.

“This is weird.”

“Maybe, but I’m you. Plus, you’re dreaming, and it’s your dream. If you don’t like anything you can say and I’ll stop.”

Young Victor settles next to him again. “Okay. I’m dreaming,” he says absently.

“Aa.”

“So, Makka. What about Makka?”

“Whatever, even if I know it. It’d be nice to remember. Tell me when you got him, what he does, what he’s been up to lately. Anything.”

Young Victor seems to think this through.

“Can I put my arm around your shoulders?” Victor says.

Young Victor nods softly into his shirt before he starts speaking. Sounds like he only got Makka a month ago: Makka is still excitable, not toilet trained, and misses Victor something fierce while Victor is at the rink. He chews things and does his business everywhere, and then Lilia’s unhappy and Young Victor has to clean it up.

It’s strange, hearing himself—it’s himself, isn’t it—talk about things that happened twenty years ago with such impassioned frustration in his voice: he needs to wake up early for skating, and now with Makka, he needs to wake up even earlier. At night, he can’t just relax, he needs to take care of Makka, too, and sort out whatever messes Makka made during the day. But in the end, he isn't mad—Makka is always so happy to see him and lick his face before curling up to sleep in his bed.

 Victor lets the high voice of his younger self wash over him. So many of these memories have gotten flatter with time. It’s only natural; he hasn’t thought about any of this for such a long time. When had Victor become so… drab? So detached from who he used to be?

“That hair thing,” Young Victor mumbles sleepily. “It wasn’t so bad. You… you can do it again if you want.”

“Okay,” Victor says. “Like this? Do you like it?” He pets Young Victor’s hair and thinks he might like it himself: cuddled into someone, just being held and petted while he talks about whatever, never even doubting that what he feels like saying deserves to be said—and heard. Young Victor won’t remember this when he wakes up—but maybe he’d at least remember the feeling.

 

*~*~*

 

In the morning, Young Victor is gone as Victor knew he’d be. But he himself feels unsettled, especially after he finds a long silver hair on his pillow. He pinches himself again, but he feels just like he felt last night. Well. So his young self came to visit. It is what it is.

Victor gets up with a groan and stretches his aching back.

He putters around the kitchen, making coffee, and drinks it absent-mindedly while he swipes at his tablet.

The news all looks the same these days. A natural disaster somewhere or other killed thirty people. Three different international conflicts are in full swing, and the refugee situation is dire. The European economy grew by half a percent. The Dow fell.

The coffee is over, but Victor doesn’t get up. He doesn’t realize how long he’s been staring at his kitchen sink when he finally blinks. Not more than a couple of minutes, surely.

He doesn’t really think about it. He just swipes the news closed and dials.

“What’s up, old man, I’m driving, I can’t talk much,” comes through the speakers.

Oh. It’s seven thirty—Yuri must be heading to the rink like he does every morning, ready to grouch and terrify the living daylights out of the small gaggle of juniors he’s coaching. “Can you come over tonight?” Victor says. “Please?”

“Hmmmn… not until eight thirty, but OK. Should I bring take-out or will you?”

“I’ll do it, don’t worry.”

“Thai?”

“Sure.”

“OK, then. I’ll see you, old man!”

Victor should really ask Yuri to stop calling him that—probably would have if it didn’t make Yuri feel better about pushing thirty.

 

*~*~*

 

On a normal day, Victor doesn’t do much. He doesn’t _need_ much, these days: he owns his place, has no need for a car, gets too sleepy to go out at night. He’s got enough invested to carry him through if he’s frugal.

Occasionally, he’s a TV commentator. Occasionally, he choreographs things for people. Occasionally, he goes to visit Yakov, who somehow still remembers him and tells him to mind his right hand when he comes out of his quad flip.

On the subway back to his apartment, Victor tries to persuade himself it’s amusing.

“You with Yakov, me with Lilia,” Yuri says one night over dinner. “Luckily, she’s still mostly sane. Just makes me clean and go get her groceries." They're having take-out, because they always have take-out. None of them can be bothered to cook. "...and she always wants to see vids of Natasha and Lyona. She’s always got excellent tips, too; I know jack shit about girls’ bodies.”

Yuri knows more than “jack shit”—he’s spent the first twenty-eight years of his life skating alongside some of the world's top women skaters, listening to them get yelled at. He’s as prepared to transition into coaching as a person can humanly be. He’d probably do an excellent job even without Lilia’s feedback—but it helps her feel useful and it makes him feel supported. Makes him feel a little less like the carpet’s about to be yanked from under his feet at any moment.

A little less like Victor had felt when he’d packed his bags for Japan and Yakov had shut him out.

Jesus, it was so long ago.

Victor pokes at his own dinner and wonders if he’d ever be up to coaching again, someday.

Mostly, it feels like too much energy to even think about it.

 

*~*~*

 

That night, Yuri lets himself in with his key and collapses on the couch. “What’s up, old man, you don’t usually call like this,” he says with his eyes closed and his head tilted up to the ceiling.

Victor watches him quietly. His jaw is strong and sharp, his hair’s tied messily. There’s shadows underneath his eyes. His coat and shoes are still on. It’s been a year since he took over Victor’s Burberry-and-loafers coaching uniform—if you’ve got to perform, you might as well get in costume—but it still looks slightly out-of-place to Victor.

“Fuck, I’m so tired,” Yuri says and sighs deeply.

Yes, he is. This much is obvious. “Sleep with me tonight,” Victor says softly.

Yuri rubs his eyes with a hand.

“Just sleep,” Victor adds.

“What about the food?” Yuri says, his eyes still closed.

“If you wake up later, we’ll eat it. If not, I’ll just have it tomorrow. Or you can have microwaved Thai for breakfast.”

“Yeah… OK,” Yuri gets up ungracefully. “Thank fuck you don’t feel like fucking. I was worried there for a second. Tomorrow morning, yeah?”

Victor walks up to him and takes off his coat. Then he throws it on the couch and starts on the buttons of Yuri’s shirt, then on Yuri’s belt. All the time, he feels very… watched.

When he finally looks up, Yuri is blushing a little.

Yuri opens his mouth. Closes it. Blinks.

“What?” Victor says.

Yuri tries again. Nothing comes out the second time, either.

“You can tell me,” Victor says softly as he unbuttons his trousers.

“I… can you… will you please do the thing? With the shoes.” Yuri says and somehow sounds five years younger, too groggy to keep his walls up properly. “I always envied him _so much_ for the thing with the shoes.” There’s anger there, simmering and bitter the way anger gets when it’s been swallowed down for too long.

There’s no “him” to envy any more—hasn’t been for going on three years now—but there’s a lot left to undo from the ten that came before. There’s still boils to be lanced and drained. “Of course,” Victor says. “When you sit on the bed. Come on.”

It’s not a production. Yuri sits, Victor gets down on his creaky knees beside him and starts undoing laces. One shoe comes off, then the other. Victor lines them up next to the bed. “Okay?” he says and looks up at Yuri.

Yuri nods and bites hard on his lip—and a tear rolls down his cheek. “Sorry, I-” Yuri wipes at it angrily. “I’m just tired.”

Victor realizes he’s still holding his feet. “It’s no problem.” He gets up, propping himself up with a hand. “We’ll do it again, if it’s something you like.”

He starts working on his own clothes, slowly and methodically, and piles them on a chair. Yuri sits on the bed, still in his socks and unbuttoned trousers, and looks down.

“Hey,” Victor says as he sits on the other side of the bed and settles under the covers. “Come here, now.”

Yuri wipes at his face again and turns—then starts crying again when he sees Victor’s arms stretched out in invitation.

“Don’t worry about it,” Victor says softly. “Just let it out if you need to.”

Yuri nods again and gets up to take off his trousers and his socks. Then he crawls up to Victor and settles next to him. For the second night in a row, Victor ends up with hair in his mouth and a kid on his chest that needs held. Though he’d never be dumb enough to call Yuri that to his face.

“Thank you,” Victor whispers into the crown of Yuri’s head as he reaches over to turn off the light. “I called you today because I wanted to hold you, and you came.”

“Well, yeah. You were sounding kind of weird.”

“I was feeling weird.” He’s _still_ feeling weird. Meeting his younger self really got to him, and he hasn’t yet sorted out exactly how. “I needed this tonight.”

Yuri’s arms tighten around Victor’s chest.

A couple of minutes later, Yuri is snoring softly. It’s only nine-ish, but it still seems to Victor that Yuri will probably sleep through the night. Victor, on the other hand, is in for a couple of hours of watching him and playing pillow. _Well_ , he thinks as he smooths some hair away from Yuri’s face. It’s not like he doesn’t need to think. About all the careful side-stepping Victor and Yuri are still doing around the elephant in the room, Victor leaving and marrying someone else. About Victor’s younger self, and who Victor has become. About who Yuri is becoming (a successful coach, someone waiting for the compound effects of twenty years of battering his body on a daily basis to catch up with him like they have caught up with Victor).

Yuri’s never says a thing about how Victor wakes up with a backache that shoots down through his right leg—except for this one time when he’d got up, sprightly and without a second thought, to make the coffee while Victor huffs and puffs his way through a couple of full-body stretches.

“Is this what I have to look forward to, then,” Yuri had said, only half-teasing, while handing Victor his mug.

“I hope so,” Victor tells him, and he doesn’t mean it tongue-in-cheek. Yuri worked harder younger, pushed himself way more than he was meant to, in part to surpass Victor. (In part to prove that he is just as deserving as Victor’s former husband.) Yuri would indeed be lucky if a little backache in the morning is the worst he’s got to look forward to.

When the time comes, there’s things Victor can do, people he could put Yuri in touch with. Victor hopes that Yuri would tell him instead of stubbornly hurting in silence (like he is hurting now, exhausted from overwork but too proud to ask for Victor’s help).

Stupid kid needs to get it through his thick skull that he doesn’t need to prove himself to Victor any longer. That Victor, of all people, knows exactly what Yuri’s achieved and what it has cost him.

They need to talk, and bad.

In the morning.

 

*~*~*

 

Victor doesn’t notice when he falls asleep, but he does notice waking up: Yuri’s weight is on top of him, his breath hot against Victor’s neck as he lines himself up against Victor’s semi-enthusiastic morning wood.

Sleepily, Victor puts his arms around Yuri and sucks on his ear. He knows Yuri likes that.

 

*~*~*

 

Later, after Victor has been sucked off and the coffee portioned into mugs, they sit across from each other at the kitchen table and companionably ignore each other in favor of their tablets.

Yuri scrolls through some kind of schedule with many blocks in different colors, and Victor absently browses the news. Many disasters have happened since he last checked, but there’s still nothing new.

“I think I’ll get a dog,” Victor says.

“What kind,” Yuri says as he presses reply on an email and starts tapping. “Like Makka or different?”

“I don’t know.” Victor shrugs. “Like Makka. I miss Makka.”

“Okay,” Yuri says and keeps tapping.

 

*~*~*

 

In the end, it’s not like Makka. Well, it is, but it’s white and it’s another kind of poodle; it’ll never grow up as large. Victor won’t complain that Yuri got it wrong because Yuri is so proud of having found a shaggy, curly “Makka-puppy” in the space of two days.

Yuri handles the puppy like the cat person that he is: he sticks it into Victor’s hands and says, “Here. I thought of getting it a litter box or something, but then dogs piss outside when you walk them, right?”

“Right,” Victor says and hugs Yuri with the puppy between them.

 

*~*~*

 

Hearing young Victor’s enthusiasm about Makka, getting Puppy—it got Victor thinking. He’d never really put together how Yakov had gotten him Makka when Victor had started to get sullen, his energy flagging. At the back of his mind, Victor had always assumed that he’d been alone, that no one had noticed. But they had. _Yakov_ had. And he’d cared the best his crabby, emotionally constipated heart could.

He’d cared about Yuri, too. Potya had shown up pre-emptively, before the worst of Yuri’s teenage sulks even started. Cats don’t need you to wake up earlier so you can walk them. They also don’t give you puppy-dog eyes and chew on your shoes when they miss you because you have to be at the rink all day. Cats are fine being left in the house and fed occasionally when you need to go compete. Now that Victor thinks about it, it’s probably no coincidence that Potya ended up being a cat.

Potya is also gone now, after a dignified, arthritic old age spent curled up on a coil and hissing at anyone who tried to touch her. “She’s just cranky ‘cause she hurts,” Yuri would say. He would touch her lightly on the head, and she wouldn’t hiss at him.

Like Victor, Yuri hasn’t gotten a new pet. He says he doesn’t have the time, but maybe now there’s Puppy around anyway, Victor could go get a couple of kittens. Yuri can play with them when he comes over without having to stress about about pet-sitting when he works too long or when he needs to travel.

 

*~*~*

 

The new kittens and Puppy sleep curled onto each other in a pile to keep warm. Victor watches them and thinks that he did good. Then he opens his tablet and starts doing research on how to train cats out of shredding the furniture.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> um. I don't know how I feel about this stream of consciousness mess but it's not getting any better, so--

 

 

At the back of his mind, Victor knows his younger self will be back. He remembers when he’d go to bed crying or angry and wake up somehow calmer and more centered—he had even started deliberately going to sleep if he felt bad once he’d noticed. There’s the single long hair on the pillow, too. Victor doesn’t get the physics of what is going on here (other people would probably think him crazy if he told them), but it seems that young Victor migh be coming to him when life gets too tough.

Victor needs to prepare.

So a couple of days later, he ducks in a small stationery shop and buys a journal.

He sits down at a coffee-shop on his way home and starts making a list of the horrible times in his life. It’s not a chronological list: things just keep coming up. High school—of course high school. But also earlier, before he’d started skating. His marriage—the little things he’d deliberately pushed away so he wouldn’t rock the boat. The bigger things they’d eventually metastasized into.

The list is four pages double-sided when Victor is done, and he’s only done because his venti Americano is over.

He flips his journal open on page number five and writes, in large blocky letters, “What would I have needed someone to tell me when this happened???”

It would be up to Victor to say it once his younger self shows up.

 

*~*~*

 

To make Victor’s life difficult, his younger self doesn’t come in chronological order, and he doesn’t only come when he’s sad and lonely.

Tonight, young Victor is nineteen, and he’s so excited to tell Victor everything about what Chris did to him.

Victor doesn’t tell him that he hasn’t talked to Chris in years.

He’s amazed at his younger self’s energy and enthusiasm; at how much joy this Victor feels just because an interesting boy hit on him.

“I’m glad that happened to you,” Victor says as he kisses his younger self on the forehead. “You deserve someone who thinks you’re great and treats you nice.”

“Is it going to be Okay from now on?” Young Victor asks quietly. “Will I be happy now?”

Victor smiles and his wrinkles deepen at the corner of his eyes. “No spoilers,” he says, and kisses his younger self’s forehead again.

 

*~*~*

 

Victor snaps a picture of the Puppy-kitten pile and wonders when it was that he stopped being excited. He concludes it happened in stages—each time bringing him closer to when he stopped seeing his life through the rose-colored lens of “maybe” and hoping.

 

*~*~*

 

Yuri’s fingers are cold on the side of his neck that night. He smells like the chill outside, slightly tinged with coal smoke; his jaw is as square as always and his lips are chapped. He kisses Victor at the door, green eyes meeting grey in silence.

Victor suddenly knows how things went wrong in the first place. He's always looked to the future, chasing a time when he’d finally be happy. He’d started asking, “Is this all there is,” at twenty-five. Hopefully now he’ll finally get it through his own thick skull that yes—Yuri's hair, his lips, the chill on his clothes, the warmth of their hug—this  _is_ all there is, and it is fine.

 

*~*~*

 

Yuri sits cross-legged in the middle of Victor’s floor, covered in kittens eager to get closer to the smells that waft out of his take-out box. He scolds them intently, talks to them about the evils of human food and scratches them behind the ears, pokes at his stir-fried chicken with a plastic fork.

At nine thirty, he falls asleep on the couch, kittens and Puppy curled up all over him.

Victor watches his hair as it spills out from its messy bun and wonders if he should call Chris. Chris is the sort of person who’d get on a plane to St. Petersburg for the sake of a “do you remember.” Yuri, however, is the sort of person who won’t take it well if he ever found out. The entire being passed over thing, the “why am I not enough” feeling is still raw, judging by the other night.

Victor thinks he should probably tell him, and soon: it had never been Yuri who wasn’t enough. Victor hadn’t been running to someone better, he’d been running away from himself. He’d been chasing  _hope_ —that if he could go somewhere else and be someone else, he’d be happy.

He hadn’t been happy.

Surprise.

Then he realizes that calling Chris and saying, "Do you remember,” would be escaping into the past, and it wouldn’t be any different from escaping into hopes that the future would somehow be different.

Okay, so Victor’s still an idiot.

“Hey.” Victor shakes Yuri’s shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed, yes?”

Yuri’s eyelids flutter. “But I like it here. There’s cats.”

“The cats can come, too. C’mon.”

“You got me cats,” Yuri says as he stumbles into the bedroom sleepily with a kitten in each hand and Puppy trailing behind.

“You got me Puppy,” Victor says.

“Please don’t leave,” Yuri mumbles as he cuddles into Victor.

Victor knows it’s his own damn fault that this is Yuri-speak for “I love you.”

 

*~*~*

 

The next morning over his second cup of coffee, after Yuri’s left for the rink, Victor thinks about the feet thing.

He remembers doing it for his ex-husband, excited about this new role—of serving and belonging: to Yuuri, with Yuuri’s family. Being motivated to be extra diligent because he subconsciously thought that working hard enough would somehow… what? Make the euphoria last forever? Somehow make sure that the flat, dead feeling never comes back?

God, he’d been such an idiot.

In the meantime, Yuuri hadn’t been who Victor’d set him up to be. He was serious and he was focused, but he wasn’t a calm and mature authority who could keep the bad stuff away if Victor just worked hard enough at kissing his skates.

He wasn’t a Yakov who’s not sour, or a dad who never left.

He was just a twenty-five year old guy, confused and bumbling along and trying to be an adult the best he could, feeling giddy and even a little uncomfortable at the antics of his childhood idol. Getting quite an ego boost, too, as Yuuri had later admitted, lamenting that he’d fallen for its lure and avoided confronting the truth.

They had both been so young, building castles in the sky and playing house.

In hindsight, Victor doesn’t know how it could have ended up in anything other than disaster.

In the end, he’d left like he’d came: one day, he just packed his many many boxes, shipped them to Yuri’s place in St. Petersburg without even asking permission, and showed up there with a carry-on bag and the stub of the boarding pass he’d got at the airport.

If anything, this time it was faster. There hadn’t been Makka’s papers to take care of.

Yuri had opened his door to him, because of course he would; there’s something about having made it through twenty years of Yakov’s boot camp that meant they  _understood_  each other; there were things they both knew without having to talk or explain. It wasn’t the same with anyone else. Not with Georgi, who did grind right next to them day in and day out but never really hit the top. Not with the other top skaters: JJ with his perfectionist mom and dad, Otabek who’d spent his parents’ oil money on coaches all over the globe, or Chris with his mild-mannered coach with dual degrees in Kinesiology and Sports Psychology—none of them really  _kne_ _w_.

Yuuri, who’d cooked ramen noodles with his best friend and took selfies covered in hamsters hadn’t known either.

For instance: Yuuri had performance anxiety. If Yuri or Victor were to ever show any, they’d have been eaten by the sharks: too many people had wanted to be in their shoes for either of them to have the luxury to wallow in weakness.

Three years into Yuuri and Victor’s marriage, Yuuri had told Victor about Yuri and the bathroom at Sochi and hoped for understanding.

Victor didn’t tell him that he did understand: how the best thing you’ve got in the absence of coddling and comfort was projecting your fears onto someone else so you could stomp and stomp and stomp them down. (Two years after the divorce, he’d learned that Yuri had caught Yuuri  _looking_  one too many times and he’d wanted to claw his eyes out.)

Yakov had coached Victor and Yuri both, and dragged them both over hot coals. But in the end, it was Yuri who’d ended up stronger: who never ran, never backed down. Who retired gracefully and took his place in the chain of Russian sport.

Who still feels less-than, because he’d worked as hard as he knew how, and Victor had still left him.

Who needs reassurance that he is loved, and that he matters.

The foot thing.

The cats.

Both of them would probably prefer getting their nails pulled out to talking about what makes them feel vulnerable, but they probably should, and soon.

 

*~*~*

 

“Hey, wake up!” Eighth-grade Victor prods him, his eyes impossibly wide.

Victor’s hand goes for his back on automatic as he blinks sleep from his eyes and reaches for his reading light. “You Okay? What happened?”

“Nothing,” young Victor says and looks down. “I just need a hug.”

“Come here, then,” Victor says and lifts the corner of the blanket so young Victor can get under. “What’s going on at the rink?”

“Nothing.”

“You can complain. I’m you, remember?”

So Victor does: he complains of all the clothes he couldn’t wear because what would the Federation say. How Yakov tells him, “It’s enough that I allow this nuisance of a hair!”

He complains how Lilia made him take off his nail polish even though he was at home, and how she’d lectured him that he should toe the line be respectable because his image reflected badly on her and Yakov as coaches.

He complains of how he can only do wrong. If he works hard and gets something right, they’d just take it for granted. But the minute he makes a mistake, he’s in for a disapproving turn of the mouth from Yakov or a lecture from Lilia.

“You’re so dumb!” young Victor says and thumps Victor’s chest with a fist. “You can wear all the nailpolish you want, but you don’t. You’re so boring and old, you’re just like them!”

“I’m sorry,” Victor says and kisses the crown of young Victor’s head. “I'll try to be less boring in the future."

"Hmph."

"Also, if you do well and they don’t notice, or if something makes you happy and they don’t understand, you should tell  _me_. Come on.” He brushes young Victor’s bangs away from his face and wipes his tears with a thumb. “Tell me about your favorite nail polish. Tell me about what clothes you wish you had.”

So they spend the next half an hour talking about things young Victor thinks are pretty.

“Oh, yeah, I remember the pink pearly one!” Victor says, “It really is a very cute color!” And, “I agree, the deep blue with the sparkles would look really nice on your skin.” And, “Of course you’d enjoy showing off your legs; all this work we do, we might as well enjoy that it makes us pretty!”

“You think I’m pretty?” young Victor looks at him like Puppy looks at Victor’s take-out pizza.

Victor looks at his younger self in the eyes. “Yeah, I think you are. And many other people will, in the future.”

“I know you said no spoilers, but… will I ever have a boyfriend? Like, a real one?”

“Yes,” Victor says and his eyes crinkle. “Yes, you will. You will share many good times, with many people.”

This seems to satisfy young Victor, even though it must mean that the good times will be followed by heartbreak.

 

*~*~*

 

The next morning, Victor feeds his menagerie, puts Puppy on a leash, and goes to buy nailpolish. An absolutely unimpressed till worker rings him up.

“Is that for you or for me?” Yuri says that night when he sees the bottles on the nightstand.

“For me. But for you, too, if you want.”

“OK. Maybe the dark blue one,” Yuri says, and that’s all the discussion about that. “Would you like me to paint your nails?” Yuri says, uncertain, a little while later.

“No need.” This is a trap from which Victor can save him. Because once you start thinking that if you only give of yourself more you’d be loved the way you need to be, there’s no limit to how far down the rabbit hole you’ll go before you work yourself to death trying. “And you don’t have to paint your nails either. But if it sounds like something that’d be fun to do, then I can paint yours.”

“Maybe on the weekend?” Yuri says.

 

*~*~*

 

The night after, Victor paints his younger self’s toes and fingers pearly pink. Little’s Victor’s smile lights up the room. Victor tries to take a picture on his tablet, but it doesn’t work. The camera only captures the dent in the bedding where his younger self sits.

Victor himself thinks he’s in the mood for a nice pale green.

He doesn’t look forward to what would follow tomorrow—the melancholic thoughts about when exactly he stopped being excited about being pretty and stopped hoping that someone would find him beautiful. (He knows, it’s the hair; he hasn’t talked to anyone about cutting off his hair, not really. That Victor hasn’t been around yet).

Thoughts about why he feels that he  _must_ _n’t_ tell anyone about the hair.

Decisions about whether he should tell Yuri, and how-

-fears about what if Yuri agrees to trying something for Victor’s sake but only pretends to find Victor lovely-

-fears that Victor is too old and bald and fat, and old, bald and fat people can never truly be lovely-

Victor sighs deeply. In and out.

That is for tomorrow.

Today, he needs to wait for his nailpolish to dry.

 

*~*~*

 

Victor wakes up because the mattress is moving. To his right, thirty-four—thirty-five?—year-old Victor is naked, with his ass in the air and his face in the pillow. Yuri drives into him, possessive and ravenous, pressing him down and saying, “Mine… fucking mine...”

His past self’s hand is clutching the bedsheets, wedding ring glinting on his finger. Not so surprising, then, that past Victor had sent his things to Yuri’s when the whim had struck him to pack up and go.

Forty-year-old Victor breathes into the ache in his back as he gets up. Then he puts his hand on Yuri’s neck and kisses him, just a peck on the lips.

Yuri looks at him wide-eyed, like he doesn’t know what’s happening but he does know it’s a miracle.

“I’ll be on the couch,” Victor tells him, because this—it’s too raw.

He’s not ready to face himself. Not this self; not this close.

The bedroom door clicks softly as he goes.

Puppy settles next to him on the couch.

Victor puts in ear plugs and dozes.

 

*~*~*

 

It’s still dark when Yuri comes and shakes him by his shoulder. He’s got a duvet in one hand.

“I told him,” Yuri says as she shakes it out over Victor, looking at the wall rather than at him. “I told him that I’m waiting for him and I love him.” His voice shakes, and he swallows. “That I always have, and always will. And that I’ll wait until he’s ready and when he is, I’ll be here.”

“Come here,” Victor says and stretches his arms.

Yuri’s crying when he spoons next to him on the sofa.

“He won’t remember when he wakes up,” Victor says. “But it looks like deep down, I’ve known it for a long time.”

Victor’s arms tighten around Yuri, comforting him until he quiets down. “Thank you,” Victor says quietly when the tears stop. “For loving me all this time.”

“Tell me, you withholding monster.” Yuri chokes on his voice. “For one fucking time in your life, tell me that you love me back-”

“I love you,” Victor says into the nape of Yuri’s neck and sounds to himself like he means it.

 

*~*~*

 

Victor doesn’t know this, but tonight is the last day his younger self shows up.

“Tell me it gets better,” twenty-five year old Victor asks him from across the bed, purple bags under his eyes. “That it’ll be OK. That happiness is possible.”

Victor remembers that day. He’d been in pain for the better part of a week, stuck recovering at home with Makka, the weather outside too gloomy and horrible to even think of going out even if his back would stop fucking hurting.

“Do I ever get to feel happy?” His younger self asks, flat. “Actually, really happy.”

Victor starts to open his mouth.

“No, don’t give me that no spoilers shit. Not now,” young Victor says, tired. “For once, I need an actual answer.”

“Yes. You do get to feel happy.” Victor tries to sound confident. His twenty-five-year old self, he remembers, has made a deal with himself: he’d go to sleep instead of killing himself, one final time, and decide in the morning. Looks like it’s up to Victor to persuade him not to.

“There’s a decision that you’ll need to make,” he starts, and he hopes against hope that it’ll work. “It’ll come out of nowhere. It’ll not make sense to anyone but you, and every single person in your life will be hurt or mad at you for making it. And… I wish I could tell you that that’s when you’ll be happy, but it’s not—not yet.”

Victor swallows nervously. It’s a responsibility, holding someone else’s life in your hands. _It worked_ , he tells himself.  _It ends up fine, you’re here after all, with two cats, a dog, and the next great coach of Russian figure skating to take care of._ (And if that isn’t hard enough, he and Yuri need to talk.)

“When you think it’s the end and ahead of you there’ll be nothing but misery, it’ll turn out that it’s not so bad; when you think,  _I finally found happiness now_ , it will end up being an illusion… You won’t know what to do, only that the time has come,” Victor says and looks at himself in the eyes.

“I can’t tell you how to be happy. Only, when the time comes, leap.”

 

 


End file.
